This article was updated at 10:20pm on Wednesday 30 October to reflect comment from DWP minister Stephen Timms.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has now confirmed in the Autumn Budget that the Labour Party government plan to follow through on dangerous DWP reforms set out by the former Conservative government. This concerns the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Work Capability Assessment (WCA) – which, if implemented, will strip nearly half a million claimants of their health-related benefits.
Reeves made a brief reference to this in her Autumn budget speech on 30 October to the House of Commons. She said:
First, we inherited the last government’s plans to reform the Work Capability Assessment.
We will deliver those savings as part of fundamental reforms to the health and disability benefits system that the Work and Pensions Secretary (Liz Kendall) will bring forward.
Of course, it means more harm is on its way for chronically ill and disabled claimants. But it is still unclear what the WCA changes will look like.
DWP WCA reforms: Autumn budget confirms it
Reeves’ was referring to the Tories planned reforms to the DWP WCA (Work Capability Assessment). It relates to which claimants will fall into the limited capability for work (LCW), and the limited capability for work related activity (LCWRA) groups of Universal Credit.
A recent article in the Financial Times had previously suggested that the Labour government was planning to plough ahead with these reforms.
It ran a consultation on these between September and October 2023. As the Canary’s Steve Topple previously detailed:
the DWP is planning to change the WCA. Specifically, it’s planning on taking out or changing the following features:
- Factoring in people’s mobility.
Bladder or bowel incontinence.- The inability to cope in social situations.
People’s ability to leave their homes.- Work being a risk to claimants or others – a clause which means that an individual is “treated as having limited capability for work and work related activity“
In November, the then Tory-run DWP responded to the consultation. Notably, it laid out how it would proceed with a number of these. Specifically, it decided to take forward DWP WCA changes to:
- Work being a risk to claimants. Specifically, it will tighten the criteria for this. Notably, it stated that: “We will specify the circumstances, and physical and mental health conditions, for which LCWRA Substantial Risk should apply.” In other words, the DWP will decide who this will apply to going forward – and will obviously move the goalposts.
- People’s mobility – which it’s removing as a descriptor altogether.
- People’s ability to leave their homes – which it will now reduce the points for in the assessment.
Particularly with the last two, the DWP essentially decided that they should instead have to work from home. In both cases, it claimed it would “protect” people who this would harm. However, again, it’s the DWP that will decide who that is. That means to say, assessors with a history of denying benefits to people that need them, and linked to benefit-related deaths, will have the say on this in practice.
So, Labour is seemingly going to follow through on all this. As of 10pm on 30 October, however, there was growing speculation over what this would look like. The Campaign for Disability Justice posted that it had spoken to the “disability minister” (presumably Stephen Timms) and:
We understand that the “savings” will be part of a wider discussion around the long-term future of disability benefits, which will be part of a set of proposals to come out in the New Year. These will also address the future of Personal Independence Payment.
We knew this already, as again Reeves mentioned this in her speech. So, it is now even more clear just what Labour is planning – as Timms neither confirmed or denied whether the DWP WCA reforms would be the Tory ones or not.
Of course, it’s all part of its broader plans to coerce chronically ill and disabled people into work.
Stripping hundreds of thousands of benefits
However, if the government runs with them, it will be implementing these DWP WCA (Work Capability Assessment) reforms in the full knowledge of its harmful impact. Specifically, these changes will mean that the DWP will strip health-related benefits from over 450,000 people.
For each change, the DWP’s own figures showed a breakdown of just how many people would lose out due to DWP WCA changes. As Big Issue previously reported, this was:
- 163,000 for tightening the criteria on work as a risk to claimants.
- 260,000 for removing the mobility descriptor.
- 33,000 for changing the points awarded for people’s ability to leave their homes.
In particular, this applies to new DWP WCA-related claimants, or those who’ve had to reapply for them.
So, it means that hundreds of thousands of people will miss out on health-related benefits when it puts these changes in place.
And contrary to Reeves’ big-talk about helping people back into work, this won’t actually do that.
This is because the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said these would mean just 5,100, 8,800, and 1,500 more people finding work respectively as a result of these changes. In other words, out of 457,000 people the DWP would deny benefits, just over 15,000 of those would actually likely move into work. What’s more, this says nothing of the mental and physical health impacts it will have on people – either in losing their benefits, or being forced into employment.
The cost: chronically ill and disabled people’s lives – again
On top of this, as the Canary pointed out before, the DWP WCA changes are also another galling U-turn, because:
At the Labour Party conference in 2023, then shadow minister for disabled people Vicky Foxcroft had told the Disability News Service (DNS) that it would not follow through on these. Of course, this was before Labour’s top brass snubbed Foxcroft for the role of disability minister. Instead, it installed her as a whip. In other words, it both sidelined her in the DWP, and curtailed her ability to hold its ministers to account in Parliament.
It shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that the Labour government is punching down on chronically ill and disabled people in its ideological love affair with austerity.
The Financial Times had suggested this would ‘save’ the government £1.3bn. It hardly shouts significant cost-savings. And of course, this says nothing of the true cost of its callous continuity-Tory benefit-bashing bent.
The fact is, DWP WCA changes will put chronically ill and disabled people’s lives at risk – and after over a decade of benefit-related deaths – the DWP WCA reforms are an unconscionable cost these communities can ill-afford.
Featured image via BBC iPlayer – screengrab
